Jeff Lail

I’m an email junkie.  I’m working on a support group for those with the email addiction.  I’m taking my email junkie pills.  But I still love checking email, and I love receiving email.

I currently use gmail.  I think that Gmail does web-based email as good as anyone, and I’d recommend if you’re looking for a new email program that you switch over to Gmail.  If you’re happy with your email program, but would like to try to cut down on your email time then I think my advice can be useful to anyone.  Most email programs have something similar to these features.

Streamlining email is about decreasing the tyranny of the urgent.  Gmail already has a good spam filter, so most of the email that is in my inbox is something that I actually requested to have in my Inbox.  But I easily receive 40 emails a day in my Inbox, most of which is not what I would call urgent.  Some of it is email subscriptions that I’ve signed up for.  Some of it is things that are not spam, but are not anything I necessarily read most of the time.

I’ve helped decrease this urgent email by setting up filters.  A filter can be set up to grab any email and direct it to a pre-assigned folder, mark it as read, or archive it (gmail’s option for saving but not deleting).  I have different settings for each of my folders.  Some things that I get I don’t need to read immediately, but I do need to read, but some things I can read if I want to or skip if I don’t.

Currently, I have five folders set up…

1) updown.com – a stock trading game that sends a lot of emails.  I don’t need to read these, so they’re marked as read immediately.

2) clothing offers – i’ve signed up to receive deals from banana republic, gap, etc.  I only really need to look at these if I’m thinking about buying some clothes.

3) good deals – I have some other sites that I sign up for that I get some cheap deals.  Again, no need to read these unless I want to buy something.

4) other work – i get emails from some websites that are for freelance writing.  I don’t need to read these unless I’m looking for something to do.

5) School stuff – I do need to read these emails but it’s not too urgent, about 50% of it’s useless.  These do not get marked as read, so I know there’s something in there.

I currently have 9 filters set up that dump things into those 5 folders.  It’s already cut down on my volume of email in my main inbox significantly.  My ultimate goal is to only have my main inbox have email in it that I need/want to respond too immediately.

I realized that one of the reasons I was checking email so much was because there was always something in there to look at it.  Pavlov’s dogs will tell you that if you receive a reward every time you do something, you will continue to do it.  I got a high off of having something in the Inbox, even if it wasn’t important.  If something important is all that I see when I login, then my email time will be better used and it will be easier to understand how often I should check email.

If you use Gmail, you can set up filters by clicking on “settings” in the top right corner of the window.  Then on the menu that comes up, click on the “filters” tab.   Click “create a new filter” under the “filters” tab.  On this menu, you need to type some way for the email to be filtered.  For instance, I typed in the box “has the words”, “banana republic”.  When you’ve selected this, click next step.  On the next screen, i selected “skip the inbox”, “mark as read”, and “apply label clothing deals”.  And finally I selected “apply to conversations below”, and “create filter”.